


Cellophane

by halotolerant



Category: Hustle
Genre: M/M, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-13
Updated: 2012-10-13
Packaged: 2017-11-16 05:35:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 415
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/536064
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/halotolerant/pseuds/halotolerant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>'The thought arrived quietly in his mind that it had never occurred to him when he’d returned to Britain that Ash would not simply be there, ready and waiting for him.'</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cellophane

**Author's Note:**

> Takes place after Danny and Stacey have left, but before the arrival of Sean and Emma.

“Yeah, but it’s not the same, is it?”

Mickey took a long breath before he answered, twisting another cellophane wrap around a little pile of talcum powder. “Masterson isn’t a user, he just wants to deal. If he believes in us he’ll not want to show ignorance of what coke should look like.”

Ash didn’t let him get away with it. “It’s not going to be the same, without Stacey and Danny.”

“Crews change all the time.” Mickey frowned, looking across the table – their reserved booth table at the new Eddie’s Bar, another thing that was the same but different. “I’ve never thought of you as sentimental that way, Ash.”

“But you’ll miss them.” Ash’s fingers tied off a wrap as neatly as they typed what might as well have been magic spells into computers, rearranging the world to their chosen design. 

It would have taken another poker player as good as Mickey to spot it, but right now his hands were shaking.

Licking his lips, Mickey let himself look briefly in the morass of feelings he generally tried not to examine too much. One failed marriage had been enough, more than enough, to make him wary of human life’s greatest con.

He could have protested that he’d left them behind in the first place, that that surely evinced a lack of connection rather than a need to escape temptation. He could have talked about the relief there’d been in balance, being attracted to both of them and using that as a counterweight to never move further with either. 

And it was not normally in him to be demonstrative either, never one to spurt out affection, but the thought arrived quietly in his mind that it had never occurred to him when he’d returned to Britain that Ash would not simply be there, ready and waiting for him. 

“I missed you, you know,” was the lone thing he said. 

Ash looked up at him then, eyes wide and shocked and eager as a mark who’d been hooked. 

With a blink he hid it, but Mickey felt the afterimage as if he’d stared at the sun coming from behind a cloud.

Before he could speak again, Eddie bustled forward with a tray and rather pointedly underlined bill and within seconds Ash was leaning back, talking technically of the con and the niceties of hiring grafters with police uniforms. His pulse raced in his neck.

Things, Mickey reflected, were not going to be the same at all.


End file.
